2nd Sunday of Advent
Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand
The Church’s new season of Advent began last Sunday, so let us review a few basics about the season. Advent is a special season of the Church’s year to prepare for Christmas. The word Advent comes from the Latin adventus, which means “a coming, approach, arrival.” Advent has a double purpose:
1. It is a season to prepare for Christmas when Christ’s first coming is remembered.
2. It is also a season to look forward to and prepare for Christ’s Second Coming at the end of time.
In today's Gospel John the Baptist tells us that the essential way in which we prepare is through repentance. How might we go about preparing through penance?
It has long seemed to me that a practical method of Advent preparation and repentance is suggested in an English Renaissance poem little known today, the “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” written by John Milton in December 1629. This poem follows a favorite theme of Renaissance Christian humanists: the birth of Christ causes the classical pagan gods to flee. Milton’s banished gods include Pan, Apollo, the Lars (gods of cities or houses) and Lemures (spirits of the dead), Peor, Baalim, Ashtaroth, Haamon, Thammuz, Moloch, Isis, Orus, Anubis, Osiris, Typhon.
The banishing of this litany of gods epitomizes to me the project of Advent. We must attempt to banish our false gods. How do we banish and cause false gods to flee?
We must repent, as John the Baptist makes clear in today’s Gospel. We might ask what false gods affect us? What gods must we dispel? For each of us these are different, but we should take time to consider and reflect, as the struggle against false gods is the very heart of the first of the Ten Commandments.
Perhaps I have made a false god of a few of these common today: My own pride, opinions? Perhaps I think myself always right? Is worry so common that I dwell on it rather than on the goodness and Providence of the True God? Maybe my work is a god? What about my comfort and convenience? Perhaps sensual pleasure and recreation?
Placing my interest, hope, and desires in things that draw me into materialism and excessive consumerism? Or maybe I am prone to seek as distractions specious joviality, social festivities, frenetic activities to the exclusion of time for reflection, time for prayer?
May we be given the grace necessary for our essential Advent project.
With the help of the True God, may we banish our individual false gods to prepare for the re-birth of Christ in our hearts, meeting Him once more this Christmas, and meeting Him when He returns in glory.
Besides a season of preparing to meet Christ, Advent is also a season of waiting and hope. Advent waiting is not the common and irritating waiting that we so frequently endure; it is not a time of doing nothing. Rather, it is a time of faith filled with expectation of joy. This waiting can even be a type of service rendered to God. As John Milton concluded Sonnet 19, “On His Blindness” (c. 1652): “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
-Fr. Don Saunders, SJ
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